Simon Starling and Willem de Rooij

H all. This is a really interesting conversation that a friend recently e-mailed to me.


Dear Friends, this is an interview I wrote with Simon [starling] last
summer. It was published in a Dutch art magazine called MetropolisM.
In the text we refer to an e-advertisement, you can find the text of
it at the bottom of the page.

E-Conversation between Simon Starling and Willem de Rooij initiated by
Metropolis M, June 2006

WdR.

For a number of years now I've been a tutor at the Ateliers in
Amsterdam, an institute that offers a peculiar mix of a post-grad
education and a residency-situation. The Ateliers has a deliberately
closed character. Participants are not encouraged to spend much time
showing their work outside of the institute during their stay, and the
building is open only to those who are specifically invited. The
Städelschule, where you and I both teach a class, has a more open
structure. The yearly 'Rundgang' is an extremely popular event with
general public but also with gallerists, curators and press. Students
become aware of the market-related dynamics of their professional
'umfeld' in an early stage of their artistic development. How long or
short do you feel the lines between art-student and market should be?
Is it beneficial for students to exhibit their work outside the
academic context?

SS.

My take on this question is very much grounded in personal experience
but having said that it's experience that's 15 years old now and
without a doubt the art world has changed radically in that time.
Having graduated art school in 1992 I had no dealings with commercial
galleries or the art market for almost 8 years, and looking back on
the way my work developed in those early years I am extremely grateful
for that time largely outside of the market. I know I would be a very
different artist if I had walked straight from art school into the
arms of a commercial gallery. It wasn't that I was avoiding it but it
just didn't happen and I didn't go looking for it. I formed my early
carrier in the context of artist run spaces and public galleries. As a
result of this my instinct as a teacher is to encourage young artists
to build something of this space into their own careers and to develop
an understanding of exhibition making without the commercial world. It
seems to me paramount that young artists find a critical context for
their work before it gets sucked into the ever-proliferating art fair
circuit. But its not so easy these days, it seems like the gallerists
come knocking earlier and earlier. The balance of power has certainly
shifted and the commercial gallery world increasingly subsumes or even
orchestrates the activities of the institutions – there's less and
less of a distinction. In Germany, the Professor system that we both
work in tends towards the promotion of students by their professors.
As you say gallerists are invited to student shows and shown
particular works. That's something I'm very wary of. For me it's more
a question of opening up as many possible approaches to exhibition
making for the students- trying to address each context or situation
from a critical position. This has led to the class creating "Art
Parking" at the Frankfurt Art Fair and then more recently trying to
connect the studios to the fair building in Offenbach with 4 kms of
fiber optic cable which where then used to transmit a video
documenting the attempted installation of the the cable.

WdR.

I agree with you – its important for students to experience what it is
like to show their work outside the studio. I think a work is not
finished until it is presented and I consider a focus on exhibition
practice a vital part of any art-school's curriculum. I'm not sure in
what stage of an education this confrontation should take place
though. Much confusion might arise on both the sending and the
receiving end of the line when artists enter the exhibition circuit at
a premature stage in their development. What are the consequences if
the work of a 20 year old is measured by the same criteria (because it
is shown in the same context) as the work of lets say a 45 year old,
or a 65 year old? In your response you seem to make a clear
distinction between the demands posed on young artists by commercial
contexts, and the demands resulting from exhibiting in non-commercial
context. I wonder if these demands are so clearly separated. How do
you see this?

SS.

I'm not someone who thinks of commercial galleries as being inherently
evil. I really enjoy working with the commercial sector, it often
brings with it a great support structure and many possibilities for
realising ambitious new projects. In fact its often much more straight
forward to make a new project with a gallery than it is with an
institution. Galleries are increasingly proactive in the area of
production and that's changing the way they function. Never the less
there is a real sense in which if young artists get involved with
galleries too soon then it can seriously impact on the way that
artist's work develops – that one, half-interesting idea can easily
become a decade of repetitive production. Of course there are similar
pressures from institutions as well. It's all about working with the
right people in the end and when your 20 years old its often difficult
to tell who has your best interests at heart. To me working with a
gallery should be a long-term project on both sides and I can't help
but mistrust gallerists who feel compelled to work with artists when
their ideas about their work have still so far to evolve. It goes back
to your point about when is the right moment to confront exhibition
making. In many ways this should happen from the very beginning and
generally does in a very natural way when looking at exhibitions by
other artists, I would always encourage students to take onboard the
framing of work within whatever context it may appear. In that way the
hope is that when they do come to exhibit themselves, they can do that
from the strongest possible position. One of the great innovations in
Frankfurt has been Portikus which over the years has allowed students
access to exhibition making of all kinds and to start to get a sense
of the possibilities, even within a fairly modest white cube.
Exhibition making has always been an integral part of the way the
school functions. Surely at the Ateliers in Amsterdam this is a major
concern too? The teaching staff there seem to be some of the most
sophisticated exhibition makers around, a monastic education would
seem contradictory.

WdR.

Let me tell you a bit about my experiences as an art student before I
answer your question. I studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in
Amsterdam in the early nineties. At the time this course took 5 years.
The curriculum was limited to say the least, and the notion that 5
year contracts benefit the vitality of a faculty had not dawned. Most
tutors had a contract for life, and when I arrived many had long
outlived their own expiration date. Besides that the salaries were so
low that it proved impossible to attract tutors that had more
lucrative sources of income, or who didn't live in the direct vicinity
of the school. Result was a staff that was in the best cases
passionate about teaching, but was not up to date with international
(and sometimes not even national) developments. As far as I know, this
situation has not changed to date. Luckily enough Amsterdam has two
excellent institutions for postgrad education: The Ateliers and the
Rijksacademy. These institutions are not financially dependent on the
Dutch ministry of education, so there's more space to maneuver. I
attended the Rijksacademie for two years in the late nineties. Their
Open Studios attract a lot of international attention, and there's a
broad range of critics, curators, artists and dealers who visit the
institute all year through. One could say the institute runs a
distinctly career-oriented program, and artistic success is often
measured on the basis of CV-related data. Many students thrive in this
system and use the mix of public attention and institutional safety to
sharpen their presentation-methods and develop a public persona. But
in this system insecure students often come to overly professional
presentations of what are basically unfinished pieces. They'll cater
to the industry with pieces that look like art, but lack material and
conceptual depth. The Ateliers, where I joined as an advisor later,
discourages students to engage in public ventures during their stay.
The institute is run by artists, and (almost) only artists are invited
to visit the students in their studio. This model provokes some
problems. As you mentioned, exhibiting is part of artistic production,
and a piece is not finished if its final contextualisation has not
been thought through. Ateliers students are sometimes somewhat
unsophisticated in presenting their work in public after two years of
intense training, and I find this deeply problematic. But the absence
of curatorial and commercial stress during their work-period proves
very beneficial for their focus on the work. At the Ateliers students
can actually take the time to produce - and reflect on their work,
whereas during my stay at the Rijks I met many people, but all I
produced were CV's and documentation-tapes. In any case, both
Rijksacademy and Ateliers work with students that are a bit older. But
at Rietveld, or Städel, some students are so young and inexperienced
that establishing relationships with the art-world - to my opinion -
can often be more confusing then beneficial. In the earliest stages of
artistic development it is often hard to take the emotional distance
from the work that is needed for professional interaction.

A number of exhibitions have been focussing on the subject of
art-eduction lately, Manifesta 6 amongst them. What do you think is
the reason for this curatorial interest, and what do you feel might be
consequences for students, and viewers?

SS.

Yes, you're absolutely right, there does seem to be a rash of things
going on in that area. I suppose in Europe it may be related to this
on-going discussion about the nature of art education in general and
its relationship to other forms of university education, the
professorial system v. the American modular system, but perhaps that's
a discussion for another day. I was very interested to read the mail
you forwarded me regarding the MFA exhibition that will take place at
David Zwirner Gallery in New York. It seems that not only does the
gallery world want to consume the institutions but also education too.
I was recently surprised by a comment made by one of my students, an
exchange student from New York, who said that it is generally
understood that what you're paying for as an undergraduate or masters
student in the New York schools is access to the market. I was also
interested to find that in a recent retrospective catalogue on the
work of John Baldessari they had published an extensive interview
solely about his teaching activities. I enjoyed this very much and
loved Baldessari's approach but that interview seems to be part of the
same trend. And as you say Manifesta has taken the model of the
Staedelschule summer school to Cyprus - although it seems that they
may have pushed a little bit further than the local politics care to
stretch. Finally it seems as if the strange Manifesta bandwagon might
have ground to a halt. Perhaps though all of this is simply a
continuation of the 'platform' culture of production that has become
so endemic and formalized in recent years. The art institution could
be seen as convenient model in that respect – a surrogate platform if
you like. When I started studying in the late 80's in Britain there
was very little talk of the professional practice within art schools,
they were places to learn a creative discipline and a little related
theory and history. There was even an implicit understanding that
probably only a handful of graduates would end up as artists – that's
changed radically and its' now professional practice is a "learning
outcome" for most schools. Gone are the days when art education was
really for nurturing rock stars. The stakes are higher now, in some
cases very high. I just came back from being the external examiner of
Central St. Martins School in London where I was immediately struck by
how many people had presented offices as their final degree show – art
education is becoming increasingly modularised and bureaucratized and
it seems the students respond accordingly.

WdR.

I know what you mean! I find the curatorial embrace of art-education
very problematic. I'm sure education is up for improvement in most
every art-school in the world. But for curators to found a structure
in which artists are taught to produce the art these curators might
want to show, to me seems like a very difficult professional stretch
for all parties involved. For a student, the implication of a similar
system would be that being educated becomes the award for showing what
the curator/teacher wants, and that learning/producing what the
teacher/curator wants results in being exhibited. I don't think
art-students, and artists, should be taught to adapt to existing
curatorial, commercial or educational structures. I also don't think
they should be obliged or expected, or even invited, to help shape
these structures by participating in fora, discussions and platforms.
I feel artists should be independent and free to create what they want
to create, and that the administrative and bureaucratic system that by
its nature and through necessity constitutes the world of curators and
dealers, must react accordingly. Maybe education is so fashionable at
the moment because exhibitions are forced - by both private and public
sponsors - to accommodate increasingly large audiences. When art (or
anything else, for that matter) has to cater to many viewers, details
and nuances naturally get lost. It is in this phenomenon that the
basics of good logo-design are laying. But a successful art-piece
derives its inherent qualities from another formal economy than a
logo, and therefor is usually understood by less viewers than a good
logo. There are two things we can do if we want nuances and details to
remain part of our understanding of art. We can try to educate the
large crowd we're currently aiming to entertain to be able to read the
subtleties mentioned above. But we could also set out to find other
(possibly more modest) means of finance, so that we can share our work
with smaller, more motivated audiences. Audiences one does not have to
teach how to be curious.